Have you ever felt like you have to prove yourself to your friends, co-workers, spouse, or even God? We live with this pressure to prove ourselves to God and others, but according to Banning Liebscher it shouldn’t have to be that way. This pressure is not from God, so where does it come from?
“It’s because we’ve defined success wrong. We have to redefine success. There are so many things in our life that we think are success that aren’t; they don’t matter to God.”
How can we gain a better understanding of what success looks like in God’s eyes? Banning says there are two things that help us understand what true success looks like.
Life is short.
“The only way that we’re able to figure out what is success is if we measure it against eternity. Life is a breath, it’s a moment, it’s short, it’s a vapor, it’s grass that grows and goes away.”
What really matters?
“We will stand before God one day and have to give account for our life. We won’t have to give account for our sins because we’re made righteous by the blood of Jesus, but we will have to give account for our life. When we stand before Him what we have to ask ourselves right now is this, Does what I’m doing matter for eternity and will Jesus ask me about it. It’s the only way to define success.”
If we don’t define success based on what God says, the world will define it for us.
“Is this going to eternity? Is Jesus even going to ask me about this? He’s not. As much of pressure as I feel to have more Twitter followers, it’s irrelevant, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to stand before God one day and have Him say Hey, how many Twitter followers did you have. He won’t ask me about it, it’s not eternal.”
Pressure comes when we are driven to prove ourselves in areas of our life that are not eternal.
“At the end of the day, success in the kingdom is I loved well and I was faithful and obedient. That’s it. What’s my assignment? I want to do that. If my assignment is to pastor a church of 30 people. If my assignment is to pastor a church of 3,000 people. It’s the faithfulness to those things that matters in eternity.”
Banning Liebscher was on staff at Bethel Church in Redding, California for eighteen years and founded the ministry Jesus Culture during that time. Banning and his family, along with the Jesus Culture team, relocated to the capital of California where they started a church, Jesus Culture Sacramento. Their vision is to see people encounter God, be empowered in community, and engage their city for revival and transformation.
God develops us in secret
